Frases de Mark Rothko (36 citações) | Citações e frases famosas

“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”

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Mark Rothko

As quoted in 'Mark Rothko', Dorothy Seiberling in LIFE magazine (16 November 1959), p. 82
1950's

“Pictures must be miraculous.”

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Mark Rothko

“Silence is so accurate.”

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Mark Rothko

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

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Mark Rothko

1950's
Fonte: Conversations with Artists, Selden Rodman, New York Devin-Adair 1957. p. 93.; reprinted as 'Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956', in Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (2006) ed. Miguel López-Remiro p. 119 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=ZdYLk3m2TN4C&pg=PA119
Contexto: I am not an abstractionist... I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

“It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.”

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Mark Rothko

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

“For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]”

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Mark Rothko

in Art of this Century, February 12 – March 2, 1946, Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 203
1940's

“I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.”

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Mark Rothko

letter to Clyfford Still, undated; as quoted in Mark Rothko : A Biography (1993), James E. B. Breslin / and Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170
after 1970, posthumous

“It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

“It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

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Mark Rothko

Joint statement with Adolph Gottlieb, to Edwin A. Jewell, often referred to as a Manifesto. (written 7 June 1943; published 13 June 1943)
1940's

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.”

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Mark Rothko

in The Romantics were prompted, essay by Mark Rothko, 1947/48; as quoted in Possibilities, vol 1, no. 1, winter 1947-48, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christophor Rothko.
1940's

“With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 168

“I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin a an unknown adventure in an unknown space... Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, pp. 167-168

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

“But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

“Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.... unfortunately, there are few existing alternatives for the kind of activity which your museum represents. Nevertheless, in my own life at least, there must be some congruity between convictions and actions if I am to continue to function and work.”

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Mark Rothko

Quote from Rothko's letter to Whitney's director Lloyd Goodrich, End of 1952; as cited in Mark Rothko, a biography, James E. B. Breslin, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 304
Rothko was turning down a museum purchase
1950's

“Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world... The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

“We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”

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Mark Rothko

common statement in 'The New York Times', 8 July 1945
1940's

“.. it was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes… But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. [his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930's]”

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Mark Rothko

As quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 143
1950's

“I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.”

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Mark Rothko

1950's
Fonte: Interiors, Vol. 110, no 10, May 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 172

“The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition... We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), p. 38

“It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!”

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Mark Rothko

As quoted in Conversations with Artists (1957) by Selden Rodman, p. 92; later published in 'Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956' in Writings on Art : Mark Rothko (2006) ed. Miguel López-Remiro ISBN 0300114400
1950's

“Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is..”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

“The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 168

“One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist.”

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Mark Rothko

in conversation with W.C. Seitz
Quote of Rothko in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 116
after 1970, posthumous

“.. one must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words..'. It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the 'Mona Lisa'. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

“If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas....(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.”

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Mark Rothko

radio broadcast, together with Adolph Gottlieb, 1943
1940's

“Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh's drama and Seurat's silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality.”

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Mark Rothko

Fonte: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

“For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious... Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world.”

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Mark Rothko

1942, on the late painting 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of Piet Mondrian
Quote of Rothko, in Painters Objects, Robert Motherwell, pp. 95, 96; as cited in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 128-129
1940's

“[the first ingredient of his work].. is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.”

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Mark Rothko

Quote from Rothko's 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute; as cited in Mark Rothko, a biography, James E. B. Breslin, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 28
1950's

Frases de Mark Rothko

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